The question came while we were standing near the workbench.<\/p>\n
Odom had been quiet for several minutes.<\/p>\n
He looked at the Shovelhead, then at Reed.<\/p>\n
"Do you think the man was looking for something?"<\/p>\n
Reed didn't answer immediately.<\/p>\n
I felt myself waiting.<\/p>\n
It was the question we had all been circling without asking directly.<\/p>\n
The diner man had wanted to know what Brix had seen on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
He had asked whether Brix had been inside the shop and whether Reed had spoken to him.<\/p>\n
Then there was the argument behind the diner.<\/p>\n
Something was supposed to be found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
It was difficult not to connect those details.<\/p>\n
But a connection was not the same as an explanation.<\/p>\n
Reed rested his hands on the workbench.<\/p>\n
"I think he wanted to know something."<\/p>\n
Odom frowned slightly.<\/p>\n
"That's not quite the same thing."<\/p>\n
"No," Reed said. "It isn't."<\/p>\n
I appreciated that he didn't pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n
Odom looked down at his phone.<\/p>\n
"Then what do we do with that?"<\/p>\n
Reed glanced toward the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
"We remember what Brix told us, and we don't make up the rest."<\/p>\n
The answer was simple.<\/p>\n
It was also the only answer we could defend.<\/p>\n
I had been hoping Reed might say something more definite.<\/p>\n
Maybe he would suggest a reason for the questions.<\/p>\n
Maybe he would remember a detail that made the whole situation clearer.<\/p>\n
Instead, he gave us the same truth we had been trying to avoid.<\/p>\n
We didn't know.<\/p>\n
I looked at the workbench.<\/p>\n
The phone sat beside the tools.<\/p>\n
Nothing about it had changed since the morning.<\/p>\n
Still, I remembered how Odom had set it down when Brix first mentioned the argument.<\/p>\n
That small movement had marked the moment when the conversation stopped being ordinary.<\/p>\n
Before then, we had been listening to a boy explain that a man had hurt him.<\/p>\n
Afterward, we were listening to someone explain that the same man had been asking questions about our shop.<\/p>\n
The difference had been difficult to ignore.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether Brix had understood the significance of the questions when they were first asked.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had thought the man was simply being nosy.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had assumed the questions were connected to the trouble at the diner.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he hadn't known what to think until he overheard the argument.<\/p>\n
I couldn't answer any of that.<\/p>\n
I only knew how he had appeared when he told us.<\/p>\n
He had looked worried.<\/p>\n
He had looked uncertain.<\/p>\n
And he had been careful not to claim that he knew more than he did.<\/p>\n
I respected that.<\/p>\n
Odom finally put his phone in his pocket.<\/p>\n
"I just don't like the timing."<\/p>\n
"Neither do I," Reed said.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was close.<\/p>\n
The argument had included Saturday.<\/p>\n
The diner man had asked about the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
Those facts were enough to make us uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
They weren't enough to tell us what would happen next.<\/p>\n
I could see Odom struggling with that distinction.<\/p>\n
He wanted to do something.<\/p>\n
I did too.<\/p>\n
There was a certain helplessness in knowing that a person might be concerned about something connected to you while having no clear way to find out why.<\/p>\n
I had always preferred problems that gave you a place to start.<\/p>\n
This one gave us several possible starting points and no reason to choose one.<\/p>\n
We could focus on the diner man.<\/p>\n
We could focus on the other person in the argument.<\/p>\n
We could focus on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
We could focus on the approaching Saturday.<\/p>\n
But each choice depended on a guess about which detail mattered most.<\/p>\n
Reed seemed unwilling to make that guess.<\/p>\n
He returned his attention to the machine.<\/p>\n
I watched him for a moment before joining him.<\/p>\n
We had work to finish.<\/p>\n
The practical tasks gave us something definite to concentrate on.<\/p>\n
I tried to keep my thoughts there.<\/p>\n
When I noticed myself wondering whether the diner man had seen the motorcycle before, I returned to what I was doing.<\/p>\n
When I wondered whether the other man knew Reed, I reminded myself that Brix hadn't identified him.<\/p>\n
When I thought about what might happen before Saturday, I stopped before inventing an outcome.<\/p>\n
It wasn't easy.<\/p>\n
But it was better than letting every possibility become a certainty in my mind.<\/p>\n
A little later, Odom spoke again.<\/p>\n
"What if the man thought Brix had seen something he wasn't supposed to see?"<\/p>\n
Reed looked at him.<\/p>\n
"That's possible."<\/p>\n
Odom waited.<\/p>\n
Reed continued.<\/p>\n
"It's also possible he was wrong about what Brix knew."<\/p>\n
I felt those words settle over the conversation.<\/p>\n
They were important.<\/p>\n
The diner man might have been asking questions because he believed Brix had seen something.<\/p>\n
That did not mean Brix had seen anything significant.<\/p>\n
It did not mean there was anything hidden on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
And it did not explain what the two men had been arguing about.<\/p>\n
The possibility was worth remembering.<\/p>\n
It was not a conclusion.<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
"That's what we have to keep straight."<\/p>\n
Odom looked at me.<\/p>\n
"I know."<\/p>\n
He sounded tired.<\/p>\n
I was tired too.<\/p>\n
The repeated questions had begun to wear us down, partly because we kept expecting them to lead somewhere.<\/p>\n
Every time we thought about them, we returned to the same place.<\/p>\n
The man had asked.<\/p>\n
Brix had heard.<\/p>\n
We didn't know why.<\/p>\n
I wanted the repetition to stop.<\/p>\n
But I knew that ignoring the questions would not make them disappear.<\/p>\n
We had to leave room for new information without creating it ourselves.<\/p>\n
Reed finished what he was doing and stepped back.<\/p>\n
He examined the motorcycle for a moment.<\/p>\n
Then he nodded to himself.<\/p>\n
I couldn't tell whether he was satisfied with the work or simply ready to move on to the next task.<\/p>\n
Either way, he seemed more settled than he had been earlier.<\/p>\n
That helped me.<\/p>\n
His calm didn't mean he had found an answer.<\/p>\n
It meant he was willing to continue without one.<\/p>\n
I needed to do the same.<\/p>\n
Odom returned to the bench.<\/p>\n
He picked up his phone, checked it, and put it down again.<\/p>\n
I noticed the movement but didn't ask what he was doing.<\/p>\n
There was no point in making every ordinary action part of the mystery.<\/p>\n
I had to remind myself of that, too.<\/p>\n
The shop was still our shop.<\/p>\n
The workbench was still our workbench.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead was still the motorcycle we had been trying to prepare for the memorial ride.<\/p>\n
Those facts had not changed.<\/p>\n
What had changed was our awareness that somebody else had been asking questions about them.<\/p>\n
We couldn't undo that.<\/p>\n
We could only decide how to respond.<\/p>\n
Reed had made his position clear.<\/p>\n
We would not ignore Brix.<\/p>\n
We would not claim to know what the diner man wanted.<\/p>\n
And we would continue preparing the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
I found comfort in the clarity of that decision.<\/p>\n
It wasn't a solution to the larger problem.<\/p>\n
But it gave us a way to keep moving without lying to ourselves.<\/p>\n
As the day continued, I thought less about what the diner man might have intended and more about what we actually knew.<\/p>\n
It wasn't much.<\/p>\n
Still, it was enough to keep the warning in mind.<\/p>\n
Enough to make us cautious.<\/p>\n
Enough to remind us that the approaching Saturday might matter for reasons we had not yet understood.<\/p>\n
I looked at the Shovelhead one more time.<\/p>\n
The machine offered no explanation.<\/p>\n
It didn't need to.<\/p>\n
Our job was to prepare it for the ride.<\/p>\n
Our other responsibility was to remember what Brix had told us and wait for facts that could clarify the rest.<\/p>\n
I had spent too long trying to force the two responsibilities into one problem.<\/p>\n
They were separate.<\/p>\n
For now, I could handle that.<\/p>\n
The question came while we were standing near the workbench. Odom had been quiet for several minutes. He looked at the Shovelhead, then at Reed. "Do you think the man … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40071,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40051\/revisions\/40071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}